The Strategy
Headwaters & Riparian Restoration protects streamside land and actively restores degraded stream reaches for salmon and steelhead trout, work that frequently matters as much for what it removes — a fish-blocking culvert, a grazing-eroded bank — as for what it acquires. The program’s flagship project, at Two Forks Riparian Corridor, paired a 2022 land acquisition with the removal of a perched culvert that had blocked upstream fish passage since the 1960s, reopening 3.4 miles of spawning habitat in a single project.
We started this program in 2016, initially as a streamside revegetation partnership with the county before expanding into direct land protection. Restoration work — willow and alder planting, bank stabilization, and culvert or fish-ladder projects — continues on preserves held under our other three programs whenever a property includes stream frontage, which is why this program’s footprint overlaps rather than competes with Ridge-to-River and Working Farmland Protection.
Post-restoration monitoring is where this program earns its keep: joint spawning surveys with the state fish and wildlife agency at Two Forks have documented returning steelhead redds in newly accessible habitat every season since the culvert came out, hard evidence that a well-targeted restoration project can produce results within a few years rather than a generation.